Mike Monroe: Nothing’s simple in Big Easy

Chris Kaman was not supposed to play for the New Orleans Hornets this season. Not if the club’s basketball management had been able to complete the Chris Paul trade it wanted to make in December.

Now Kaman is a Hornet in name only, perhaps for only a few more weeks.

In the latest twist in a New Orleans saga that gets more curious by the week, the club has told Kaman, the only current Hornet who has been an All-Star, he won’t be suiting up for the foreseeable future. Instead, the team will play younger big men in need of development while it does what it can to negotiate a trade that will send Kaman somewhere he can be more useful and happy.

Kaman, 30, is a legitimate 7-footer, a physical player with offensive skills. That makes him a valuable trade commodity, but less so under these curious circumstances, especially considering his expiring $14 million salary.

At just about the same time the Hornets disclosed they were shelving Kaman, they revealed that guard Eric Gordon had turned down their offer of an extension of his 2008 rookie scale contract. That decision will make him a restricted free agent this summer.

According to several reports, the Hornets had offered four years and $50 million, about $5 million less than what Gordon sought.

Gordon, of course, was the key player the Hornets received from the Clippers when they sent Chris Paul to Los Angeles in December. He is a potential All-Star, but a knee injury has sidelined him for all but four of the Hornets’ games.

Now his future with the club is clouded, just like Kaman’s.

It is possible, then, that two of the three players acquired for the Hornets in the Chris Paul deal NBA commissioner David Stern, et al, brokered in December won’t be on the roster when training camp opens for the 2012-13 season.

Stern had nixed the three-team Paul trade general manager Dell Demps had previously negotiated with the Lakers and Rockets for “basketball reasons.” This, we were told, was because it didn’t do enough for the club’s future.

The league owns the Hornets and wants to sell the team to a buyer, preferably local, who will commit to keeping the team in New Orleans. Stern deemed a young roster that would include Gordon and a 2012 first-round pick from the Timberwolves that seemed certain to be valuable, a better selling point than the roster the club would have had with the players Demps had arranged to acquire — Luis Scola, Lamar Odom, Kevin Martin and Goran Dragic.

It’s not Stern’s fault Gordon is hurt. But even had he been healthy, it’s hard to imagine his version of the Hornets having more victories at this point in the season than the team Demps had envisioned.

Now two of the former Clippers could be gone and that Minnesota draft pick becomes less valuable with every game Ricky Rubio helps the Timberwolves win.

Meanwhile, the businesses and fans, who pushed season-ticket sales past 10,000 in early December in efforts to “rebrand” the team, suffered through nine straight losses — six of them at New Orleans Arena — before the Hornets broke through Friday for a blowout of the Magic, a team in disarray even more troubling than the Hornets.